1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to a method and apparatus for updating computers, and more specifically to a system and method for automatically updating and repairing computers.
2. Description of the Related Art
Software vendors offering support for their products often deal with incidents related to software failure or incorrect results. When particular software is offered to a wide range of customers, there is a high probability that a problem (i.e., a common problem) has already been encountered and solved when dealing with a different customer.
At the same time, non-technical support personnel are frequently not able to locate actual problems. Thus, either the customer is asked to repeatedly install patches (i.e., software portions designed to be inserted into existing software programs to overcome identified problems) or technical personnel are involved to help determine if a particular incident is a problem and has already been solved.
Another problem is being able to verify if the patch (i.e., the “fix”) would work on a larger number of machines, without having to manually test the fix on each of the machines affected.